In the fast fashion industry, product updates are rapid, and designers need efficient design tools to respond to market demand. This article introduces the startup Raspberry AI and its text-to-image platform, which uses generative AI to help designers quickly visualize and iterate design ideas, significantly shortening the design process and reducing sample costs. With its unique technical advantages and business model, Raspberry AI recently received US$24 million in Series A financing, demonstrating huge market potential.
In the fast-changing fashion world, major retailers launch new styles every quarter, and fast fashion brands like Shein, H&M and Zara are constantly updating their product lines. In order to keep up with the market's urgent demand for new models, brands and manufacturers have sought technological means to speed up the design process.
Raspberry AI, a two-year-old startup, is one of those tech solutions that helps designers quickly visualize and iterate on their ideas through its text-to-image platform.
Raspberry founder Cheryl Liu was a private equity analyst specializing in retail and later worked at Amazon and DoorDash. She saw the emergence of image models like OpenAI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion at the end of 2022, and realized the opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design. "For the first time in history, we can quickly create hundreds of designs in an unprecedented way." Liu Xue said in an interview with TechCrunch. She further explained that previously designers often had to order physical samples to visualize their ideas, a process that could take weeks.
With Raspberry, designers can transform sketches into realistic images as if they were already displayed on the brand's website. Liu Xue pointed out that this method allows brands to see design variations in different materials and prints in advance before deciding whether to produce a product. "No company would order 50 sample iterations of a single product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of the same design."
With its rapidly growing business, Raspberry recently received $24 million in Series A financing led by the well-known investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. Participants also include existing investors such as Greycroft, Correlation Ventures and MVP Ventures. The funding comes about 10 months after the company closed a $4.5 million seed round.
Bryan Kim, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said that they were interested in Raspberry because it could speed up the fashion manufacturing process, and they were also excited by founder Liu Xue's entrepreneurial ideas. “We met with several companies and were excited by Liu Xue’s professionalism and her approach to company building.”
Although Raspberry competes with other AI image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Adobe Firefly, Liu Xue pointed out that the key reason why professional designers choose her product is its ability to understand and accurately parse industry-specific terminology. For example, for the term "plush sweater", Raspberry can provide a more accurate design understanding than Midjourney.
In the future, Raspberry plans to use the financing to recruit engineering, sales and marketing professionals and expand into home, furniture and cosmetic product design.
The success of Raspberry AI lies not only in its technological innovation, but also in its accurate grasp of the needs of the fast fashion industry, providing designers with efficient design tools and accelerating product iteration. In the future, its applications in more fields are worth looking forward to.